Dude I remember when live booting knoppix was impressive. Hell my intro to Linux was mandrake. We have so many great distros and documentation available now it’s crazy.
Ahh Knoppix :’) I think live boots were my introduction to Linux.
I ended up learning by memory the US keyboard layout because i got tired of having to change it whenever i booted knoppix up.
Now i have all my keyboards set to US international. Best layout for programing.
SUSE on 6 CDs
I remember finding an early ubuntu CD just lying in the street. Took it home, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t turn my ailing laptop right around. Got 5 more years out of that thing.
Wow an Ubuntu CD just casually laying on the streets
Just laying there.
In the street?
In the street. Like the gutter.
It had like a cardboard case covering it, though.
lying
No, it’s true!
Dad?
Hm. I started using Linux (Ubuntu) somewhat around 2007. And I was quite fascinated how flashy it was with all those desktop effects compared to the rather boring XP. Only problem I had back in the day was wifi, but I didn’t play a lot of games at that time.
But yeah, once I solved that wifi problem I had internet, so there was a difference.
It forced me to learn. It took me weeks to get X configured and working correctly. I had an internet subscription and a modem but it also took weeks to get it to work on Linux. My distribution came on a CD from a magazine but some dependencies were not included, so I had to reboot under Windows to download a missing package, reboot on Linux and try again, then need to get the next dependency. We came a long long way from having to specify the vertical refresh rate of the monitor in xf86config.
Starting with a French version of Slackware was brutal but I had nothing else.
Be 12 in 1998
Literally just ecstatic that I could wiggle around a little X on a blank screen after giving up trying to load a window manager.
Pop in a BeOS live CD to feel like I did something cool
ah i had forgotten about xf86config. /silenthillvoice
I used xp for 15 years and i miss it. Fuck this ribbon nonsense too. Where is the desktop cloud? My precious is lost… i’m lost…i have no fucking idea where that file i just saved went… i built a pc in 2002 and progranned a vcr as well. Now i’m toast.
Definitely describes my switch back in 2008 when canonical still sent out Ubuntu CDs for free in the mail. We had dial up so it was faster for them to mail me a CD than to try and download the image myself.
If the ping rate is irrelevant, then the good old sneakernet is a great way to transfer large amounts of data.
My first Linux distro was Puppy Linux, on a computer with no internet. I downloaded it on an internet cafe to replace Windows XP Fenix Edition.
My PC was too weak to run any flavor of the major distros, and I wanted to give it a go.
Best computer-related decision of my life to ditch Windows and use Linux as my daily driver.
me after installing Ubuntu because it was the only other OS I’d ever heard of, because I accidentally nuked my Windows Vista install by trying to overclock the CPU in a Gateway laptop:
Similarly, my XP install just died and I didn’t have a copy of Windows to reinstall. Gnome 2 taught me computers don’t have to look or feel boring and the terminal taught me they weren’t scary.
Learned a lot that first year.
I remember getting a copy of linux from my friends at a local LAN party (though it was tokenring party for us) around ‘96. 2 floppy disks. I’m 99% sure it was slackware.
Shit, what games could be played on token ring?
Token Ring is a network protocol where a token—a small data packet—circulates around a ring topology, allowing only the device holding the token to transmit data, thus avoiding collisions. We played Doom and Quake.
Lmao I did this exact thing. Installed Ubuntu on the home desktop. Immediately occurred to me that I couldn’t connnect to the internet to look up how to do anything else. Scrambled so hard to find that XP disc and atone for my reckless folly.
Still have my physical Ubuntu Hardy Heron DVD somewhere
I remember first learning about linux OS and how to create a Linux USB installer using rufus to bypass the password my parents had put on the windows side. In those days there was no eifi boot loader lock you could access the files just by trying out the new OS you had in your USB. LOL.
That amazing experience of having to print out instructions at a friends house to recover a dual-boot system after either grub fucked up or windows XP fucked up. Good times.
My first was SuSE 6 or something like that, back in the 90s. And my mom freaked out, because the PC didn’t boot Windows95 anymore. And I had a huge book, telling me what to do. It came with the CDs.
Iirc Suse used to give away previous versions to highschools, so probably yours was running Yast with a lot of software included.
